1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a plucked instrument type (e.g., a guitar) or a bowed instrument type (violin) electronic stringed instrument and, more particularly, to wide-range musical tone control in various electronic stringed instruments.
2. Description of the Related Art
A variety of conventional electronic stringed instruments have been proposed, and some of them are commercially available.
Pending U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 69,612 and 171,883 by the same assignee as that of the present invention disclose electronic guitars each adopting switches which are carried by corresponding strings and are operated in response to the plucking operation, and pressure-response type switches embedded in a fingerboard in a matrix fashion. The former switches are used for controlling the start of generation of musical tones from a sound source, and the latter switches are used for determining pitches of musical tones.
Pending Japanese Utility Model Disclosure (Kokai) Nos. 63-51395 and 63-51396 by the same assignee as that of the present invention disclose electronic guitars each adopting a converter for picking up vibrations of strings, an envelope detector for detecting an envelope of the pickup signal, and an evaluation device for measuring a peak value of the envelope. The peak value of the envelope represents a plucking strength, and is used for controlling a tone volume of a musical tone internally generated. Each disclosed electronic guitar has a tremolo arm and a tremolo arm sensor. An output from the tremolo arm sensor is used for modulating the frequency of a musical tone.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,723,468 discloses an electronic guitar which identifies an operation position corresponding to a fret on a fingerboard which is in contact with a string of a musical instrument by utilizing an ultrasonic wave. The detected fret position is used for specifying a pitch of the musical tone generated by a sound source.
Pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 112,780 by the same assignee as that of the present invention discloses an electronic guitar using a pitch extractor for picking up a vibration of each string, and extracting a string vibration period data (pitch data) from the picked up signal, and a pitch setter for designating a pitch corresponding to the extracted pitch data.
However, the above related arts do not take wide-range musical tone control in an electronic guitar into consideration. Only limited, fixed musical tone control functions are provided for performance inputs.